Michael Wong Blog

An earlier story, Overture Signs Deal with Gator, is causing an uproar amongst webmasters and the search engine community, with many marketers claiming they will be boycotting Overture from now on. What's the big fuss about, you may ask? Well, Gator is a new class of advertising software products, known as Scumware, which typically installs on your PC as part of a software download, without you requesting it. Another well known scumware product is eZula. Once it's there, the software does tricks like putting commercial links by highlighting words on every web page, inserting a yellow background behind keywords that have been purchased by advertisers -- without the site's consent. They can also trigger a pop-under window when a scumware user searches on a site such as Google and Yahoo. If a web user clicks on one of those yellow highlighted words on a web page, the user is whisked away to the site of the company paying the most that day for each click-through. What this basically means is that scumware "steals" traffic and customers from web sites, without compensating the site owners. Commercial web sites that sells products or services, advertising, or refer visitors to products and services via affiliate programs lose out, as scumware companies are effectively "stealing" these sources of income right from under the web site owners' noses. Jim Wilson of Scumware.com has classified this type of advertising software as a "virus" -- since you didn't ask for it, it takes control of your browser, and makes changes to everything you read on the Internet. Other major search engines that advertise in the Gator network include LookSmart, Terra Lycos, FindWhat, and Espotting. For more information on this topic follow this heated discussion at WebmasterWorld. There are also links to press coverage on Scumware and the effects of these programs under these categories, Allegedly Unethical Firms: Gator and Allegedly Unethical Firms: Ezula, in the Open Directory.

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